Botanical Notices from Spain, 251 



lodged on the fifth night, is a pleasant but quite lonely and very 

 unsafe table-land, almost wholly covered with Pistacia Lentiscus, 

 which gives it a beautiful dark green colour. Among these I found 

 single shrubs of Phillyrea angustifolia. Ph. media and Arbutus Unedo, 

 the latter loaded with white bunches of blossom. At Puerto- Ser- 

 ranos, lying on the Guadalete, which from this point rushes in innu- 

 merable windings to the Atlantic Ocean, commences the immense 

 .broad land of the Guadalquivir. The Sierra de Montellano had still 

 to be crossed, — an undulating plateau covered with pistacios and the 

 kermes-oak, where I found the shrubby Glohularia Alypum, L., in 

 flower, and for the first time descried the Atlantic in the distance : 

 upon this terrain, extending as far as the little town of Coronil, 

 olive-trees and large groups of palms occur. The country from 

 Coronil as far as the pleasant town of Utrera is an undulating 

 arable land with scarcely a tree upon it, which, as the dried stalks 

 showed, may in summer be covered with, in great part, Atractylis 

 cancellata. On the 7th of December I at length rode, in the rain, 

 which from that day to the present has continued almost uninter- 

 rupted, from Utrera to Seville, five leagues distant, the road to which 

 leads almost continuously through olive-groves and forests of Pinus 

 Picea. 



The perfectly level environs of Seville, consisting of a sandy- 

 loamy soil, are said to be clothed in April and May with flowers, but 

 I scarcely think the character of the soil is such as to produce any 

 very remarkable flora. For, besides that the country is very level, 

 it is almost all cultivated, with only occasional patches untilled. The 

 heat of the climate of Seville, as I have been assured by Americans 

 from the Havannah and Peru, is in the summer not exceeded by the 

 glowing heat of the West Indies, and its spring is of short duration ; 

 as early as June everything is completely burnt up. In the summer 

 a suffbcating heat prevails, whilst in winter the air is not cold but 

 disagreeably moist, — so moist, that in the chambers, which are 

 always on the ground-floor, everything, — clothes, beds, books, paper, 

 &c. are in a few hours wet through. This part of Andalusia espe- 

 cially, where snow is only known through tradition, is visited by a 

 thoroughly rainy season, like the tropics. In spite of all my endea- 

 vours, I could not succeed in obtaining any dry paper, so that I 

 could only preserve ray plants from complete destruction by fre- 

 quently turning and shifting them ; for drying them was out of the 

 question here, where nothing could be had to obtain artificial heat. 

 I took advantage of the few fine days during my stay in the capital 

 of Andalusia to make excursions in the neighbourhood, which at 

 first the Guadalquivir, a mile in width, surrounding the whole city 

 like a lake, utterly prevented. On the walls and ditches in the im- 

 mediate suburbs I found Mercurialis annua, L., and the Calendula, 

 which has been before mentioned, frequent ; also in the latter part 

 of my stay, on shady grassy spots, Ficaria ranunculoides , a Fumaria 

 and a beautiful large-flowered yellow Oxalis, together with 0. corni- 

 culata, frequent and in flower. Under the high corn I saw Veronica 

 hedercefolia, V. verna, V. arv'ensis, Lamium purpureum, Capsella Bursa- 



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